New Map - Endless Arena [skirmish, scripted]

[CulturedCait]

Hello!

Imagine a perfectly symmetrical world... 
Where harmony is the most important virtue...

Can you survive this seemingly endless war?
Can you dominate the world?

Welcome to the Endless Arena!

 

Features:

• Automatic adjustment of allies/enemies depending on their military power
• Fair support for weaker players
• High difficulty due to equilibrium oriented design & scripting
• Unique gameplay leading to test new ideas. The key to victory is use your cunning and maintain balance. You'll have to use stratagems and art of wars rather than sheer military power.

Notes: recommended 64bit version of 0 A.D. Alternatively you can lower population limit in game setup if out of memory occurs during large battles.

Version  : 1.5.5
Map Created  : 10/27/2024
Last Edited  : 1/14/2025
Map type  : skirmish
Players#  : 8
Size  : Giant
Tested @ 0 A.D. Alpha 26

Changes:

• v1.5.5 [1/14/2025]: replaced turkeys with chickens, changed map preview to fit 0AD convention

 

Mod io homepage (always latest version): https://mod.io/g/0ad/m/map-endless-arena

Direct ZIP download: Endless Arena v 1.5.5 or *.pyromod format in attachment

 

 

My idea was to create a map, where the gameplay on the one hand could be extended as much as possible, and on the other hand it remained fair and symmetrical for everyone.

To achieve these goals map uses set of algorithms to calculate power of each player and use this information to impose balance between them. 

Calculating Power

As a short introduction, you need to remember few things. Typically power of a state is the sum of its kinetic power (known as military) and potential power (widely known as economy and R&D). Economy and R&D is treated as a potential power only because it may be forged to build military power later in the future. Otherwise it could be completely irrelevant. In fact many scholars often ignore economic power, because it is typically being used for purposes other than building military forces. It becomes useless in predicting or explaining various events from the large scale perspective. History proves this may be good approach. Many states ignore economy as a mean to create their own military power (either involuntary or coerced by other powers), leaving real future of a state in the hands of other greater powers. Whatever the reason, most of the economic power is usually wasted. Same applies also to 0AD to some extent. Since it is difficult to tell how much economic power would be turned to strength in the future, and how useful technology investments would become for military uses, Endless Arena uses only military might as power indicator. This is not perfectly accurate, and later addressed in "Divine Intervention". But in the end it is military might that determines the future of a kingdom.

Unlikely to in-game military score, only current military power is being used as a factor. In dynamical systems, historical achievements does not determine future at all if they possess Markov property. And most chaotic systems we observe in life, seem to have this property. 0 A.D included. What matter is power "here and now" (factor "A" in below equation) and how well it is being used. History may tell us only about how well power is typically applied by a given state (strategic culture, quality of commanders, leaders). In Endless Arena this is represented by factor "B". So the formula used to calculate power of a kingdom in Endless Arena is following:

Power = A * log(B)

Where:

A - Current military power potential

B - How well military power is being applied

Current military power

Current military power is being calculated based on all of your current population, its cost and health. We can easily assume the more expensive the unit, the more powerful it is. If your soldier is heavily wounded (25% of health), we can also assume they're tired and 4 times less capable of fighting comparing to freshly recruited one. Of course there are many other factors, like forge technologies, that should be applied to this to be more accurate. However, during tests this heuristics appeared sufficient. Other players development progress was usually similar, hence easily ignored - especially in the late game experience. So to recap, to determine power potential Endless Arena uses: current demography, their cost and their well being.

How well military is being used

There exists simple indicator that helps to determine how well you're managing your military: Kill/Death ratio (KDR) and this coef is being used for "B". During tests it appeared to be important to use logarithmic function with this coefficient, as it operates much better toward equilibrium. We can fell it - there is not much difference between someone who manages to have 100 KDR comparing to 20 KDR. It doesn't really mean they are 5x better than the other. They're both skilled generals. And the difference may be related to luck, weaker enemies or geographic properties.

Typically geographic landscape and players proximity should also be taken into consideration. The reason is, that "power" (soldiers) shifts and flows according to certain geographic properties. In this regard in some places power would always equal to zero no matter how good it looks in raw numbers. Even if state is equipped with elite soldiers and high demography (consider oceans or mountains as an example, where people and their goods simply cannot be present). On the other hand there are some places of extreme importance. Consider mountain passages or straits, where soldiers would have to always be displaced in order to reach, gain or defend "something".

Therefore I decided to create symmetric map with equal distance to each other player, equal number of resources etc. This way we could mitigate geography factor in our equation.

Technical details

Endless Arena map calculates power and alliances each 5 minutes. During the assessment process, algorithm calculates all possible alliances combinations and permutations, and chooses best according to the simple rule: the more similar in power the alliances are, the closer to equilibrium such alliance set is. Mathematically, the smaller standard deviation between the power of each Teams (alliances), the better set of alliances. After the process of deciding who belongs to what alliance, each player change their teams automatically. Typically weaker players are paired with better one, best players are usually lone wolfs facing bigger threats alone etc. Map tries to keep balance at each stage.

Divine Intervention

Previously there have been described some issues with economy value used to calculate power. On the one hand you can't use 100% of economy value to calculate power as most of it is wasted from the power perspective (same applies to military power, however in military we can easily determine how useful it is examining units health). On the other hand, however, some of the economy is being used to train your soldiers, research military technologies helping you with your military power etc. This definitely should be used to calculate might. How to find a good solution to this? Given the level of entanglement in game mechanics and possible outcomes, there seems to be no answer to this problem.

Hence my approach is a little different. I'm not using economy potential to calculate power at all. But, during assessment process, each player is estimated how much military power it lacks to the best player. Let's assume Player 3 in terms of military is best player (100%), and Player 1 is at 84%. Player 1 lacks 16% of power to the best player. Endless Arena assumes that Player 1 must be lacking some military resources to achieve Player 3 level. These missing 16% are calculated to manpower that would be needed to get to 100%, and then converted to regular resources amount (food, wood, ore & stone) needed to recruit these missing soldiers. Next, these resources would be distributed to the Player 1 as a divine help during the next 5 minutes in form of tranches (one small tranche each 10 seconds). These additional resources should be used to build missing military capabilities. But if the Player already have "missing resources", no help would be given at all! Game assumes, that if a player already have enough resources to build military, but for whatever reason they are not building it, it's their business. Volenti non fit iniuria.

Lets consider few examples how it works.

Example 1. Sometimes you could face the situation to inadvertently become target of the whole world. Just imagine the situation, especially in the beginning of the game, when you're the fastest developing player (as a human comparing to AI) and in the numbers become stronger than sum of 3 other players. You're not as good as all 7 others, but still considering raw numbers they'll be coerced to form a strong alliance against you! Initially you could even repel some waves of the enemies, but in the end this will even worsen your situation as officially your power increases thanks to high kill to death ratio in the next assessment (you're also skilled tactician). After few initial victories you probably won't have enough time and resources to heal all your soldiers...  And even if you do, your enemies have operational depth (in spite of facing huge losses at the front!). This depth helps them to continue their development, while you're occupied with warfare. Weak alliance you'll be part of, probably won't be much of a help due to problems with coordination. They would even expect help from your side, since you're powerful! You'll find yourself quickly in a big pressure, typically rolling back most of your hard earned progress! Yeah, it's true that after such a defeat, with next estimate you would be part of a strong alliance, but what about your destroyed economy and kingdom? Not an easy thing to start from scratch, when everyone else is at City Phase. Thanks to divine intervention, you'll receive big help as a severely weakened player in comparison to other, more powerful. First you violated equilibrium with your outstanding development, then another equilibrium is violated to help you and eventually balance will be restored. Just like with tight rubber band that tries to find natural position after being released.

Example 2. Similarly, just imagine you won few battles with AI due to your tactical skills. At some point they refuse to develop and build military.. This is typical problem in most regular 0 A.D. maps. Mostly due to destroyed economy. Result of one or two great battles determines future forever. Game is ruined, as you totally dominate world. To address such issues with balance, AI will be bestowed upon with lot's of resources (but not more than it is needed to attain your military level) that'll help them to repel your vile actions. Again: the point of the game is to keep balance as much as possible, so everyone could exist and live as long as possible.

Known Issues

There are few known issues:

• When diplomacy changes, we can witness short lags. And since there are many alliance changes (depending on situation there may be even >20 changes each 5 minutes) you may expect short lags in game each 5 minutes. I don't know how to mitigate the issue and whether it's related with AI or internal game engine, so the only solution to this was to add ~2 second delay between diplomacy switch.
• During tests in Windows, there were sometimes problems with memory (Out of Memory exception). Solution to this is to use 64bit version of 0 A.D. Optionally you could limit the number of population in game settings to control memory usage.
• Map wasn't tested in online play. Currently it's unknown whether script works correctly in on-line game.

 

Hope you'll like this map! I'm appreciating all feedback. Thank you!

 

 

map-endless-arena.pyromod

Edited Tuesday at 13:53 by CulturedCait